There’s this thing that we programmers do called code reviews. This means that someone else needs to review your work before it goes ‘live’. As experienced as we may be, engineers are humans and thus fallible. Over the years, I’ve used many different tools to conduct these code reviews and many different teams do it to different levels of scrutiny. Sadly, sometimes that scrutiny is none. For at least a decade, I’ve advocated that we need to conduct code reviews for all changes.
The downside is that everyone gets busy; there have been times when I’ve been waiting for someone to sign off on my changes for over a week. This caused me to eventually walk into a teammate’s office and insisted she pull up the code review on her screen (and refused to leave until she did). She didn’t necessarily need to do it that moment, but when she returned from lunch, it’d be there waiting for her.
About a day later another teammate walks into my office and asks to chat with me in private. He points out that my approach to ultimately getting unblocked was needlessly confrontational. This young engineer was in their first year of the job; I had easily 25 years of seniority over him. In many ways, I could’ve made his life miserable. However, he was standing in my office, advocating for another whom I had effectively bulldozed.
He was right and that took courage. I vowed to curb that behavior and asked him to keep me honest. Furthermore, I chatted with that engineer whom I browbeat into conducting my code review and apologized.
A lesson of another kind
A group of us in our division met with regularity about diversity and inclusion issues. We discussed different topics regarding diversity, micro-aggressions, and more importantly what we might do to improve. We conducted many listening sessions that allowed us to get details into our collective experiences. During one of these planning meetings, this same young engineer suggested that we adopt the use of personal pronouns upon introductions.
“My name is Frank; my personal pronouns are ‘he/him’.”
This was many years ago. Even while this working group, most of us had only first heard of the use of personal pronouns weeks before. If it felt awkward and unfamiliar to me, who is sympathetic, how would it feel for someone who was not? I pushed back and asserted that it would only serve to alienate people.
I was wrong
Gender identity is important; it speaks to who you are. We need to normalize it as much as we can and as quickly as we can. The more we introduce ourselves with our personal pronouns, the easier it is for those of us with more fluid gender identity to introduce themselves as such. I don’t think I ever went back and apologized to him for that.
This has nothing to do about my professing my gender. It’s about understanding that someone out there will make one of the scariest announcements in their life in front of strangers. They may be subject to bias and ridicule, yet they do it with vulnerability and pure courage. It’s about being your most authentic self. I will introduce myself with my pronouns to demonstrate that I stand with you. I refuse to allow you to endure this on your own. It’s about solidarity and allyship.
If you understand all that, and you still mock me for introducing myself with my pronouns. Would you rather these people who are not cisgender endure this scary moment completely alone? Would you criticize me for giving them an iota of solidarity? You would still choose to maximize their discomfort and anxiety simply because they’re different. If all that is true, then it’s no longer about gender or inclusivity. It’s about inflicting cruelty towards those who are different; you can at least own it.
It’s not about engineering practices or gender identity
Some will read this post and think it is about engineering, gender identity, or even political correctness. These stories are merely talking points around a grander issue, the ability to listen with empathy and change. Specifically, it speaks to the ability to own your mistakes. I could’ve easily gone into grumpy mode and dismissed the advice and sometimes still do.
While I have easily twenty times as much experience as some engineering peers, I seek the opinion of my less experienced peers precisely because they have not developed my biases. I have blind spots like everyone else and I’ll invite people to hold me accountable for my behavior. It takes conducting each conversation with empathy and humility. It means that I need to entertain the idea that I may be wrong about those issues.
Some may read through what I do and conclude that I came to these ideas easily; I did not. Every conversation is a humbling experience. It is a discovery process of understanding another human perspective as much as you can. You will learn about blind spots you have and that there are some places and situations that you can never hope to navigate. It means that you need to admit that you don’t have the answers and that you need help. It also means that sometimes, you need to admit that those you hate and with whom disagree most, are right about something. You need to own the mistake, apologize, and make amends.
Why go through all this struggle?
Simply because empathy and compassion demand it. We need to elevate who we are collectively. To steal Dr. Brené Brown’s definition of integrity, we need to understand that integrity means that you ultimately do what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy.
At times, this means that we re-evaluate each of our commonly held beliefs, because they may be wrong. It means that we challenge the notion that black people are only three-fifths of a human being. It means that we reject that a white man and a black woman should go to prison for simply being married. Similarly, the idea of ‘separate but equal’ when it came to schools was never equal. We look at all these ideas that we now find objectionable, yet they were ‘progressive’ and ‘radical’ at the time.
Is it possible that the notion of transgender citizens is simply another issue that we’ll look back upon in thirty years and simply say, “WTF were we thinking?”
Embrace empathy and change
I no longer work with that young engineer, but we’re still friends. It’s years later, and she is now a young woman. I only hope that she conducts herself with the same courage and integrity that she demonstrated when we were teammates. We need more people like her in this world.
We won’t always agree, but we can express ourselves and listen with respect and an open mind. Don’t merely disagree because it is awkward and unfamiliar. Change will always feel awkward and unfamiliar at first, but if we don’t change, we can’t improve.
As for that young woman? I am now, and aspire to always be, her champion.